User talk:Dhoffman 20/sandbox

Your lead was really well written! I think you could perhaps add a little more information about the Emai clan if you have it, as well as a general overview of the later sections, or highlight any especially interesting features of your language.

Overall your page is very thorough and complete with a lot of information, great job! It is clear that you put a lot of time into your page and that hasn't gone unnoticed! You did a thorough job of linking to other wikipedia pages.

I'm assuming that most of the information came from your grammar, so be sure to cite it more often (at the end of each paragraph as Prof. Kalin updated us).

A note on the IPA Charts, I personally find them to look cluttered when you also link to the pages next to the phonemes themselves. You could either just include the links for the ones that are identical (visually) and then have both the phoneme and the link for ones that are different visually (like /kh/ and [x] link), or have a link outside your chart that links to the universal IPA chart as a whole, so readers can go there to see which ones are relevant to Emai (if this makes sense).

Syllable structure and tone sections were clear.

The morphology section was quite long, and while most of the technical terms make sense to someone in this class (which is the goal of the page), I'm wondering if there are ways to condense it that make it more accessible and easy to follow. Also consider if all the examples you provide are necessary or if just providing one key example that illustrates what you're talking about will be enough. For example in the lexical compounds and the root reduplication sections, instead of 3 examples you could just have 1 or 2. Cutting down like this throughout your page might make it easy to read. You could also cut redundant examples and provide more in-depth explanations of the ones you provide.

Headedness section: I don't think it's necessary to have the name of the subsections be complete with (head) and (complement) etc. because they get really long. Alternatively you could just call them Possessee + Possessor, Determiner + Noun Phrase, etc. Or, you don't have to dedicate separate sections to each of these examples at all and just have them under the headedness section. Just my thoughts!

I also think that you can add a statement at the end of your examples that reiterate why each example is head initial (use words to identify the head) beyond bolding. Additionally, if you do have any head final examples you could provide them just to show that it's possible, since you say that a majority (not all) are head initial.

Overall nicely organized, clear, and easy to follow. My main concern regards quotation. There are a few parts (I noticed this mainly in the Morphology section) where you quote a long-ish phrase and I wasn't too sure if this was allowed. These phrases may be hard to paraphrase, but I would either double check that it's fine or find a way to avoid the phrase (if you can't find a good way to paraphrase).

I think the main section you would need to check is the morphology section. It's the section that is most confusing to me. There also seem to be gaps. Of course, you don't have to go over every single morphological process in your language, but maybe if you mention something, then provide a short explanation or brief example. You could also (in case that is too much) be more general and provide explanations/examples for the more general categories. For example, instead of listing all the types of derivational morphology (e.g. noun to noun, noun to verb, etc), you could just say there is derivational morphology that operates on nouns (this groups a lot of the types in the previous list in one category). (Side note: I would double check these suggestions with Prof. Kalin as I'm not sure myself how to handle "gaps").

Use the Interlinear template to make your glosses line up nicely (check Piazza).

Also, don't forget to cite throughout the sections (although this is something Prof. Kalin mentioned recently and something I didn't do quite right either).

Does have all the basics. Wondering if you could flesh it out (not sure how much information your grammar provides). For example, why do Edoid languages receive little linguistic attention (and what does it mean to receive little linguistic attention)? How is Emai still level 4 (are there maybe language schools just for Emai or are children encouraged to learn it)?

For the most part, nice organization and formatting (especially the syllable structure tables).

Vowels

I'm finding your vowel chart mildly confusing, mostly the nasal rows. At glance, it seems like you have duplicate rows. Maybe name them something like "close nasal" (although maybe your grammar doesn't explain them this way; if so, ignore this comment)? Or make a fancier formatted table (maybe something like the voicing stuff in the Quechan example page's consonant chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quechan_language)

Consonants

(Minor) there is a way I believe to split a column so that it has two parts (I'm thinking voiced/voiceless). May require some extensive Googling to figure out how, so only do this if you have time.

Tone

Is there perhaps a page that describes "down-stepped high tone"? It's not obvious to me what that means, even with the linked "Tone" page.

This section overall could use more linking/explanation of some terms. For example, I'm not sure what "body-part locus and abstractions", "imperfect continuous", or "prospective predictive" means.

If it helps (maybe as a point of reference/example), I found your reduplication section the most clear (although again, be wary of quoting).

You also mention adverbs a few times but don't really provide examples about adverb morphology. There are other things you list but provide no examples of (like pronoun inflection, "verb-noun collocations", etc.) Perhaps you left them out because otherwise you would have a lot of ground to cover. If so, that's fine and understandable, but maybe double check that these gaps are okay (I'm not too clear how thorough we're supposed to be).

Inflectional Morphology

I don't understand why "Inflectional morphology plays an important role for Emai in relation to 'pronouns,...'". Why is it important? Are other types of morphology (I guess derivational) not important?

I think there may be typos in your Nominal Root Inflection table. I'm also confused about the gender aspect (what it is and what the first column of your table means especially in relation to "gender").

Derivational Morphology

I'm finding the Distributive Suffix hard to understand from your explanation/examples. I'm wondering if there's maybe a typo with the first example?

For compounds, why are only analytic compounds shown? What about the other kinds? You could maybe explain what the other kinds are if you don't want to provide examples.

Headedness

What are examples of head-final head/complement pairs? You mentioned the "vast majority" are head-initial, but this suggests to me that there are some head-final examples and I would be interested in those too (for the sake of completeness).

--Jczhu (talk) 21:29, 11 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]